other answered, "You are going a journey, how will you do without it?" She said, "As well as you, who have often taken off your gown from your back for me."

Towards the latter end of this discourse, she told Mrs. Bargrave that she had received a pension of ten pounds a-year from Mr. Bretton, commissioner of the customs, who, she said, had been her great friend and benefactor.

She asked Mrs. Bargrave if she knew her sister, Mrs. Haslewood, who, she said, was coming to see her as she was taking her journey? The other asked again how she came to order matters so strangely? She said the house was ready for them. It proved that Mrs. Haslewood and her husband came to her house just as she was dying.

By this time she began to look disordered, and forgetful of what she had said, as if the fits were coming upon her, which was like the acting a part to take away the suspicion of death. As this visit seems in a great measure designed out of gratitude to a friend, without giving any apprehensions, so the several parts of her discourse, that relating to Mr. Bretton's pension, her sister Haslewood, the scouring her gown, the quantity of gold in the purse, the rings and the plate in pawn, are designed as credentials to her brother and the world.

At last she asked Mrs. Bargrave, "Where is Molly?" meaning her daughter; she replied, "She is at school; but if you have a mind to see her, I will send for her"; to which the other agreeing, she went to a neighbour's house to send for her, and at her return found Mrs. Veal without the door of the house, in readiness to be gone.

Mrs. Veal asked if she would not go with her? which the other took to be to Captain Watson's, in Canterbury, and said, "You know it is as much as my life is worth; but I will see you to-morrow in the afternoon, after sermon. But why are you in such a haste?" Mrs. Veal then said, "In case you should not come, or should not see me, you will remember what I have said to you." She saw her walk off till she came to the turning of a corner, and then lost sight of her. It was market day, and immediately after the clock struck two.

Mrs. Bargrave, at that instant, told a neighbour of Mrs. Veal's visit, and the matter of their conversation; and a neighbour's servant, from a yard near her window, heard some of their discourse, and being asked by her mistress if Mr. Bargrave was talking with his wife? made answer that they never talked of anything so good.

At night, her husband came home in a frolicsome humour,

and taking her by the hand, said, "Molly, you are hot, you want to be cooled", and so opening the door to the garden, put her out there, where she continued all night, at which time she thinks it a mercy she had no apprehensions about Mrs. Veal's apparition, which, if she had, it probably would have cost her her life.

All Sunday she kept her bed, in a downright fever, and on Monday morning sent to Mrs. Watson's to enquire after Mrs. Veal, and as she could have no satisfaction, went herself and had as little. They were surprised at her enquiring for Mrs. Veal, and said, they were sure, by their not seeing her, that she could not have been at Canterbury; but when Mrs. Bargrave persisted that she was, and described her dress, saying, she had on a scoured silk of such a colour, Mrs. Watson's daughter said that she had indeed seen her, for none knew of the gown being scoured but themselves, and that her mother helped to make it up. In the meantime, Captain Watson came in, and told them that preparation was making in town for the funeral of some person of note in Dover. This quickly raised apprehensions in Mrs. Bargrave, who went away directly to the undertaker's, and was no sooner informed it was for Mrs. Veal, but she fainted away in the street.

For a long time she was harried with crowds of all kinds of people, who came far and near to gratify their curiosity, the most sceptical on one hand, and the most superstitious on the other, and during her husband's life-time she was most unmercifully exposed to his raillery.

Mr. Veal, to save the legacies, or out of an imaginary regard to his sister's character, would have bantered off the matter by saying, that Mrs. Bargrave had but little of his sister's acquaintance, and that the gold said to be in his sister's cabinet was in another place. This obliged Mrs. Bargrave to send him a letter, by a gentleman she could trust, to be delivered before witnesses, and with the exactness to write in what manner it was sealed. In this, among other things, was communicated the secret delivered by Mrs. Veal, which, though at present it put him into a great passion, yet obliged him to pay the legacies. From that time, whether from a fright he had one night (as she was informed by his servants), or however else, he would not lie without servants in his room; and though he had declared before against marrying, yet married in six weeks.

His evasions were so frivolous to Dr. Stanhope, Dean of Canterbury, that when he endeavoured to make the doctor disbelieve the story, and the doctor pressed him how she should come to know so much of her secret affairs? to divert the

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argument of her appearing after her death, he owned his sister could conceal nothing from her, intimating she might have told her in her life-time. He was so picqued at the doctor, that when he came to Canterbury to be married by him, he was married by another; nor was he ever able to encounter Mrs. Bargrave, but industriously avoided her.

Mrs. Bargrave was a person who had had the education of a gentlewoman, of a great share of modesty and good sense, and a temper so little given to fancies, that none could have more contempt for the common weaknesses of this kind. She said she should have laid this to imagination, if it had not been by day, attended with so long and particular conversation, at a time when she knew no other than that the person was living, and was under no sort of apprehensions; but as it was, she could not give up her reason and her senses in compliance with such as would have it she had been in a dream.

Such as knew her many years, and could be trusted as to her character, said she was a person who had all the reality of religion, with the easiness that became it, of which she had given substantial proofs in her life; so that her fidelity would take off any suspicion of her inventing such a story; whatever end or advantage might have been proposed by it, when, as the case was, there could be none.

It is true, things of this kind are beset with difficulties of a very hard solution; but if we consider how many things there are abroad in nature, and even in ourselves, the manner of which is no less hard to be explained, and yet no one is so sceptical as to deny their being; upon the evidence of a fact so fairly attested, a man may be induced to believe it without any risk of his understanding: nor is any consequence to be raised against things of this nature, from the numberless weak and fanciful stories of apparitions. It may be safely said, that the one is no more affected by the other, than true miracles are by what the Holy Scriptures call lying wonders, i. e., sorcery or legerdemain.

Warning given by a Strange Messenger to James IV,
at Linlithgow Church.

That there is a spiritual world inhabited by spirits, angels, and happy beings, and that of a very different nature and constitution from what we live in here, is a truth acknowledged by the whole Christian world; and although no angel has come down from heaven to declare and explain the nature of their being to us; nor any man, whilst in the body, hath ascended

up and seen it, yet that we should not be entirely ignorant in this particular, it has happened from time to time, that many credible witnesses have, upon some extraordinary occasions, received warnings and messages from both the heavenly and hellish kingdoms of spirits.

The following relation is taken from the annals of the kingdom of Scotland :—

While James IV stayed at Linlithgow, to gather up the scattered remains of his army, which had been defeated by the Earl of Surrey at Flodden-field, he went into the church of St. Michael there, to hear evening prayer. While he was at his devotion, a remarkable figure of an ancient man, with flowing amber hair hanging over his shoulders, his forehead high, and inclining to baldness, his garments of a fine blue colour, somewhat long and girded together, with a fine white cloth; of comely and very reverend aspect, was seen enquiring for the king; when his majesty being pointed out to him, he made his way through the crowd till he came to him, and then, with a clownish simplicity, leaning over the canon's seat, he addressed him in the following words :--"Sir, I am sent hither to entreat you to delay your intended expedition for this time, and proceed no farther, for if you do you will be unfortunate, and not prosper in your enterprise, nor any of your followers. I am further charged to warn you not to follow the acquaintance, company, or counsel of women, as you value your life, honour, and estate." After giving him this admonition, he withdrew himself back again through the crowd, and disappeared. When service was ended, the king enquired earnestly after him, but he could not be found or heard of anywhere, neither could any of the by-standers (of whom many narrowly watched him, resolving afterwards to have discoursed with him) feel or perceive how, when, or where he passed from them, having in a manner vanished from their sight.

Spirit of a Poor Man just deceased, appearing, is the means of a gentleman's preservation.

Mr. Weston, of Old Swinford, in Worcestershire, was walking, one evening in the summer of 1759, in the park of Lord Lyttleton at Hagley, and being overtaken by a sudden shower, ran for shelter into a grotto, and stood under a spreading oak, under whose shade several cattle were standing. He had not been ten minutes in that situation, before he saw the form of a man pass over the brook almost close to the shade. Sup

posing it to be a poor peasant who had long worked for him, he called him by name, but received no answer, and the apparition quickly disappearing, he found his mind much agitated. Regardless of the storm, Mr. Weston withdrew from the place where he had sought an asylum, and ran round a rising hill, in order to discover the form which had presented itself to him. That, however, had not the effect desired-but one abundantly more salutary it certainly had; for just as he had gained the summit of the hill, on his return to the grotto, a tremendous flash of lightning darted its forked fury on the venerable oak, shivered it to pieces, and killed two of the cattle under its boughs.

On Mr. Weston's return to Swinford, he found that the death of the labourer was just announced in the neighbourhood. He told the story to his friends, who, on the ground of his known veracity, could not well refuse it credit. He saw the body, at his own expense, decently interred, and afterwards contributed to the support of the widow, not only by remitting a year's rent for her cottage and piece of ground, but also by settling a small annuity upon her till she should

marry.

We have told this tale simply as it was related by Mr. Weston, and leave the reader to make his own reflections on so marvellous an interposition of Divine Providence, without deciding in this, or such other case, whether the form that appeared was the soul of the deceased, exerting its philanthropy in its flight to the unknown country, or the guardian angel of that soul returning to give up his charge, and produce his account at the bar of the Supreme.

Two apparitions to young Mr. William Lilly.

The following affair made no inconsiderable noise in the North, about the middle of the present [18th] century, and is still in the memory of many men yet living. On the first Sabbath-day in the year 1749, Mr. Thomas Lilly, the son of a farmer in the parish of Kelso, in Roxburghshire, a young man intended for the church of Scotland, and who then had made no small progress in literature, remained at home to keep the house, in company with a shepherd's boy, all the rest of the family, excepting a maid-servant, being at sermon. The young student and the boy, being sitting by the fire, whilst the girl was gone to the well for scme water, a venerable old gentleman, clad in an antique garb, presented himself, and after some little ceremony, desired the student to take up the family